Does Windows 8 succeed as a true tablet operating system?

When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's bad...

Predictive text

The final part of any good touch keyboard is autocompletion. Windows 8's autocompletion is quite simple in implementation; when the system has a word to suggest, a suggestion box hovers near the insertion cursor, and the left and right arrows get temporarily replaced with an "insert" button. Hitting the button inserts the suggestion. If you don't want to accept the suggestion, you just keep on typing.

After enough usage, the predictive suggestions will include full words, allowing even phrases to be entered just by banging "insert" a few times in succession. For example, I've typed a few pangrams into Windows 8 repeatedly to demonstrate the keyboard to people and take screenshots, and now my on-screen keyboard suggests "dog" every time I write "lazy" and "brown" every time I write "quick."

The use of an explicit insert button, rather than having the OS automatically complete the suggestion just when you hit space, works well and avoids unintended or unwanted completions.

The suggestions themselves tend to be accurate, though they could do with being smarter. For example, when I'm filling out an e-mail address, Windows 8 knows that (at least, presuming the application is correctly written and properly tells the system that a text box is meant for e-mail addresses) and changes the keyboard appropriately with an @ button and a .com button. But it also disables suggestions. So while it knows my e-mail address (God knows I've typed it in enough times) and while it should also know all the e-mail addresses in my contacts list (because the People app knows them all), it doesn't bother suggesting them to me. Windows 8 is by no means unique in this regard, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.

In a similar vein, there appears to be no provision to add or remove custom words, though I can't discount the possibility that I've merely not figured out how to do so.

I'm ambivalent about the use of a floating balloon to make the suggestion (as in iOS) instead of a suggestion bar just above the keyboard (as in Windows Phone and Android). This is a complex issue driven by a mix of data and personal preference. The obvious advantage to a suggestion bar is that it can offer more than one suggestion, and this in turn offers more autocompletion opportunities. While most of the time when using Windows Phone and Android I want the default suggestion (if any), I use non-default suggestions often enough that to me, they're worth showing.

The counter argument is that putting the suggestion at the text insertion point means that it's easier to see. Microsoft has done a lot of eyeball tracking to watch the way people actually use the touch keyboard. When they're just learning the system, they spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard itself, but as their experience grows, their focus shifts so they spend more time looking at the text and less at the keys.

Putting the suggestions next to the text, rather than next to the keyboard, therefore tends to favor the more experienced typists. While that certainly makes sense in the long run, I still feel that something has been lost compared to the Windows Phone and Android keyboards.

I should also note that my experiences are only with the US and UK English layouts. Other languages' layouts may be better or worse; one of our readers vigorously disliked the Swiss French layout, for example.

Pen power

Finally, mention must be made of handwriting recognition. Stylus support is an optional feature of Windows 8 hardware. Microsoft's ARM-powered Surface tablet, for example, won't include a digitizer for pen input, but its x86-powered Surface for Windows Pro device does includes stylus support. Pens have a clear advantage over fingers for things like sketching and diagramming, but they also create the possibility of handwritten input.

There's a lot of science behind Microsoft's handwriting recognition, and it's been in development for many years. The net result is nothing short of incredible (again, with the proviso that I only tested English input), and it's both fast and accurate.

My handwriting is atrocious at the best of times; I'll often scrawl something down only to be completely incapable of reading it at a later date. Windows 8 was positively honey-badgerish in this regard: it didn't care. My writing, which I suppose you'd call cursive (but only if cursive means "when you read it, you'll curse the name of whoever wrote it"), was recognized accurately almost all of the time.

It does better at reading my writing than I do.

When my scrawl wasn't recognized accurately, it was generally a simple matter to fix the problem. Windows 8 has gestures for making corrections, splitting and joining words, and erasing characters, and that's it. They are easy to learn, and they work well.

The system is also sensible enough to ignore finger input when pen input is being used, so you can lean your hand against the screen with no ill effect. Windows 8 also blocks the use of pen input for password fields.

That said, I'm not sure how useful the pen input actually is. In most scenarios, I suspect that the touch keyboards are the better input method, though I could see pen working quite well with a tablet being held like a clipboard.

Interface elements

The actual building blocks of Metro interfaces are fairly straightforward derivatives of the user interface elements Windows has used for a long time. Buttons, for example, are styled a little differently—they're flat and unshaded, and large enough to be hit consistently with your finger—but they work in much the same way as they have ever done.

There's one new control that's used liberally across the operating system, though: the toggle switch. Familiar to users of other touch platforms, this lets you turn things on and off. For most purposes, it serves as a replacement for the traditional checkbox control—though that still exists, and a few parts of the UI use checkboxes where toggles seem like they would work just as well.

Why the first few settings are checkboxes and the next is a toggle switch I do not know.

Combo boxes, those drop-down lists of items, also now wrap around the end of long lists, so no matter where you are in the list, you can see every item just by scrolling in a single direction. The boxes demonstrate this new behavior only when activated using touch; pen, mouse, and keyboard activation has the traditional scroll-to-end-then-stop behavior.

Regrettably, they still respect the Windows tradition of being quite small, even when the lists are very long. As a result, you have to scroll even when there's enough space on-screen to show all the options at the same time.

So how does it all work in practice? Great—until you enter the desktop.